Jack Maher, 78

Down Beat publisher transformed magazine

February 15, 2003|By Howard Reich, Tribune arts critic.

For more than three decades, Jack Maher published Down Beat, the world's most revered jazz magazine, guiding the Chicago-based publication and its parent company, Maher Publications, through oft-turbulent times.

Yet despite increasing competition from rock-music magazines, cable TV and the Internet, Mr. Maher transformed a long-struggling journal into a profitable business and a champion of music education.

Mr. Maher, 78, who was born and raised in Oak Park, died Friday of natural causes in Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove.

"Jack Maher was a cheerleader, a taskmaster, an agitator, a go-getter, a visionary, a curmudgeon when he wanted to be and your grandfather when he wanted to be," said Frank Alkyer, a longtime Down Beat staffer whom Mr. Maher appointed late last year as publisher.

"He always said that the first job of a business is staying in business, and that's what he did for Down Beat. He made sure it stayed alive and flourished."

Indeed, when Mr. Maher acquired Down Beat--outbidding Hugh Hefner, said Alkyer--the future of the publication hardly was assured. Established in 1934 to chronicle the comings and goings of touring swing bands, Down Beat had been a labor of love that never turned a profit.

Its shaky finances, in fact, caused an earlier owner who couldn't meet his printing bills to forfeit the magazine to its printer, John Maher, who was Mr. Maher's father. But after John Maher's death in 1968, his son saw the potential in the magazine and put up his own money to acquire it.

With the assistance of various editors who passed through the magazine's offices (first in the Loop and more recently in Elmhurst), Mr. Maher built Down Beat into a leading forum on jazz. Its distinguished roster of writers included Nat Hentoff, Leonard Feather, Dan Morgenstern, Ralph Gleason and Ira Gitler.

Though Mr. Maher's father famously had resisted featuring black musicians on Down Beat's cover, Mr. Maher immediately changed that policy.

"The cover is the vehicle used to get potential readers into the magazine," Mr. Maher told the Tribune in 1994. "Down Beat has always championed jazz, which has meant championing African-American musicians."

And in the 1970s--when the definition of popular music in general, and jazz in particular--was in flux, Mr. Maher insisted that Down Beat come to terms with related musical genres.

"Jack was the first one to say, `We're not going to put border lines on music; we're not going to tell people what is and what is not jazz,'" said David Baker, distinguished professor of music at Indiana University in Bloomington Ind.

Mr. Maher, who graduated from Fenwick High School and was a first lieutenant in the Marines during World War II, presided over Down Beat's participation in "Soundstage" (a 1977 public television concert featuring winners of the Down Beat readers poll) and established the Down Beat Student Music Awards in 1978.

Mr. Maher is survived by his wife, Pat; his sister, Dorothy Niemer; and six children, including Kevin Maher, president of Maher Publications.